Reels - for moments that matter

Inspiration

This is a personal pain point I have: Me and my hack partner, Nagendra both know each other since undergrad , roughly 10 years. We must have had 100s of pictures together that either of us took. But, if we ever want to revisit those pictures from that epic birthday party in college back in time, we can't find it. We know that those pictures are somewhere on either on G-drive or iMessage but those are not classified and discoverable. We have ran into this problem time and again in different situations where people scramble to collect all the pictures that different people captured at an event.

What it does

Reels is an iOS app for group-based, private sharing of stories. It:

lets users create stories for different occasions and share it with friends
Following whatsApp privacy model and allows friends to add to the story. For eg. both me and my hack partner are here at YC Hackathon today and we have taken a bunch of pictures. We both can add to the same story which others can see and comment
allows unlimited photo storage

How I built it

We built it with Swift on front-end with AWS for backend.
Database : mysql

Challenges I ran into

We planned a lot of features that we could add but we had to cut the scope in the middle of the hackathon
That's why 'chat' couldn't make it to the demo

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We still built a complete, functional iOS app during the hackathon

What I learned

We've been thinking about this idea for a few weeks now, the hackathon was the catalyst to get it done. We'll do more of these private hackathons to get things done.